Interview with the Authors: Part 3

How about today? How did things turn out differently than you thought?

Borodin:

Nobody anticipated how ubiquitous computers would be, that they would be in everybody’s home and more commonplace than telephones. I do not think we envisioned that, and of course everything that comes with that: the internet and high-speed communications. We always talk about information as power, but the fact is now that there is so much power involved in computing. We carry around a little telephone that is a thousand times more powerful than the big computer we had at the University at the time.

Any issue that comes along with that widespread use is something that I do not think we would have addressed. Yes, we talked about decision making and centralization of power and the importance of data, we talked about all that, but we did not envision just how important it would be. Who would ever have imagined that political protest movements would use computers or flash crowds, and just how you can manipulate information to start causes, for good or for bad, how you can sometime facilitate the overthrow of a government as am extreme example of having a tremendous political impact. It is quite interesting and of course we see this whole thing being played out on such an interesting scale when you look at something like the Chinese Government which so worries about controlling of information and ideas and the power of those ideas. They control access to the internet and which sites you are allowed to see.

Gotlieb:

In December [2012] the ITU met. The ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, which essentially governed the rules for international telephony, had not had a meeting for about 40 years. In December they had their first meeting in 40 years in Dubai, and there were 190 countries represented. The big issue that came up there was: should there now be government control of the internet? The motion was put forward and voted on, but not passed unanimously. China and Russia and Iran and Pakistan all felt that really what goes on the internet ought to be seen by the government and controlled first. The United States of course, Canada and other countries, democratic countries, objected. So how much control should you have over information? The internet is relatively free. We have right here in Toronto the Citizen Lab, which is determined to make sure that government censorship does not deny their citizens access to certain topics. So there is a big debate going on, a global debate going on, about what control is needed.

Some say that maybe more transparency is needed. For example, ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a private corporation in the United States. China says: we have a Chinese language internet, why on earth should an American company decide whether we can have a particular Chinese language name for a website? ICANN actually does have the rule that if you have something on .ca, the Canadian group look after names for .ca. So ICANN replies: if you have .cn at the end of it, you can do what you want. But .cn is English, of course. So China responds that they do not want any English in the name: we have a perfectly good writing system of our own that is thousands of years older than yours, so “thanks but no thanks”. So what to do about the internet is really a work in progress. People admit that there are problems: but how much control and who controls and what you control is really an ongoing process.

Borodin:

Something else that we could not have anticipated when we wrote the book is the widespread use on the internet of electronic commerce. We were thinking about automation as an employment reducer, but now look at online sales. They are starting to grow. It may level off, but how many physical stores are being affected? Well, judging by the Yorkdale shopping mall I guess we can keep on expanding stores, but I know more and more people who want to do all their shopping online. It is often cheaper, it is convenient and they like doing it this way. And as long as you do not have sizing problems (clothing can be an issue), and you are buying products that you can buy off the internet, why not do it that way? Some people like myself still like to go into stores; well, I do not like to shop at all, but to the extent that I shop, I prefer to shop in a store. But the internet has changed things dramatically, in the same way that all the internet sources of information are making the newspaper business a whole different business completely. It may turn out to be just an electronic business after a while. We have what people would say is the popularization of information dissemination: everybody is an expert now. Who would have ever thought that something like Wikipedia could work, that you could replace real experts in a field by a kind of collaborative work on things by people with genuine interest and self-interest. Now of course Wikipedia has its problems. You have a lot of stuff on there that is just not correct. But usually Wikipedia addresses it, or it addresses itself. It is an interesting phenomenon. Really, there is no more notion of an Encyclopaedia Britannica. More generally, we will see other applications of crowd sourcing partially or completely replacing experts.

Gotlieb:

I was actually an advisor to Encyclopaedia Britannica. They paid me $1000 a year to give them advice, and if you look at the last editions of it you will find my name as an advisor. Now, when CDs and DVDs came out, I wrote them and said this is going to make a big difference to you, because it is a storage device where you have pretty rapid access and you could look things up. And they did not answer me. And I wrote them again and they continued to pay me $1000 a year until they went out of [the printed book] business. But they did not pay attention. You see, they would have been driven by the marketing department and the marketing department was selling books, so that is who they took their advice from.

Borodin:

But even now, even if you are selling content on DVDs or something like that, nobody really needs anything physical. I still like to read books, but there is a growing population that prefers to read things off the internet. I observe my wife, who was mainly uninterested in most things technological till recently. She has now learned to read electronically: she likes reading off her iPhone. She finds an iPhone enjoyable to read from, and it is just astounding to me. It is a little bite-sized window which you can hold wherever you are, and in particular when you are in bed.

When you think about it, how computers and just the way we do information technology has changed, it just changes the way we operate. So, for example, we used to go to libraries to look up things. Now, search engines have taught us to be experts on query based search. This is not new anymore. Search engine technology has been the same for the last twenty years. It is keyword search and we have learned how to do it. We humans have learned how to phrase our questions so we usually get the answers that we want without asking experts, without going in and having a dialogue.

There were a lot of things we did not anticipate but in general, whenever you predict something is going to happen in the short term it does not happen: you are usually way off. When you say something is not going to happen soon, it happens a lot sooner than you thought. But we tend to be very bad at predicting what the issues are going to be. It is not just us, it is the industry itself. A few years ago, the Vice-President of Microsoft Research came to visit the university. I do not remember what he was talking about exactly, but I remember a comment in the middle of his talk. He said that we all knew search was going to be big in the mid-1990s. But if you knew it was going to be big, why didn’t you do something? And IBM did the same thing. IBM had a search engine before Google: it had all the experts in the world there and they did not do anything with it in the mid-1990s. But the real thing was that these companies did not think there was any money to be made or that search engines were not part of their business. And as soon as the right way to do advertising on search became clear (there were companies that led the way in search, but they did not do it the right way and it cost them their futures), when Google (or someone) had the right idea to take what was going on before but add a quality component to the ads, to match up the ads with the search queries, then all of a sudden this became 98% of the income of Google. That’s why they are a successful company. Nobody initially knew what the model would be for making money. Could you sell information? Was that the way you were going to make money on the internet? Or is it going to be a TV model where you are going to make your money through advertising?

Gotlieb:

And a slightly different question that you hear a lot about now, a little less, but the question is this so-called network neutrality. And the question here is, do they charge all users the same rate according to volume and rate at which you give them their answers, or do you give a preferred charge. Now, if you are on email, you are interacting at a certain rate but of course if you are trying to look at a video there is a lot more data coming through per second than you are when you are typing emails. So companies have said that people and situations where you demand a faster rate and better bandwidth, we should be entitled to charge more for that. On the other hand, or maybe they are our big customers, maybe we will charge less because we will make more money from them anyway from selling the thing. But there are other people that say, well, look, the internet is a tool for everybody and we are trying to preserve a kind of democratic internet and everybody ought to be charged the same. And you heard a lot about the phase “network neutrality”, it been passed around in the last year without being answered.

Borodin:

At the provider level, many of the providers do offer different qualities of service for different payments, but I do not know when you are actually paying for the communication links, when the providers are actually paying for it, I do not know how that whole economy works. It is kind of a hidden business out there. But at the level of the provider, most of them now do try to have different levels of service according to what your bandwidth usage is.

Gotlieb:

Rogers [Communications] was always saying they are the fastest. You see all kinds of ads now: “My computer gives me an answer quicker than yours does”, and you actually see ads for that from Rogers. So clearly they feel that faster response time is something that is valuable and that you can either charge more for or use that as an advantage to get a bigger business.

How do you think the field of social computing will develop in the future?

Borodin:

As a field, I am not sure where it is going. We do have a [University of Toronto Computer Science] faculty member who is working in climate change informatics and things like that. So I suppose you are going to see various examples of people working in information technology who will apply it to something that they think is important.

Gotlieb:

You see that now on Linked-in. The field of computers has subdivided into so many special interest groups already and if you at social network, for example, there are these social networks for community networks, so, for instance, there might be a social network for people in Vancouver who are interested around what they are doing in their community. And then there might be somebody else who asks, “Let us see what different communities are doing about a particular problem?” There are social networks for people who are suffering from cancer. Specialized networks are springing up and now it is pretty hard to say where it will end up.

Borodin:

I think social networks is really an important point. I mean the large-scale online social networks like Facebook; you know, who would ever have imagined how popular that would have been. And again in not being able to forecast these things, if we remember the movie [about Facebook], in that movie the President of Harvard thinks, “What is this worth, a couple of thousand dollars, and why are you making such a big fuss over this whole thing?” We know that already social issues have developed because of the way people are using social networks, the way you can intimidate people over a social network, people are driven to suicide because of these things. So, clearly, when anytime something becomes so widely used and so entrenched in our culture, obviously it brings along social issues with it.

Gotlieb:

At my 90th birthday celebration, somebody asked me to give an example of social issues in computing. Well, I gave them one, it is in the book. I said the following: we see that computer controlled cars are coming, some states already allow them on highways. Now, if a robot or computer controlled car gets into an accident, in the United States, given that it is a litigious society, who do you sue? Do you sue the programmer, do you sue the company that put that program in, or do you sue the driver who was there and may have been able to intervene but did not? Who gets sued?

Borodin:

Well, in the US you sue everybody.

Gotlieb:

Well, that is true. The social issues grow out of this. We come up against the wider problem of a responsibility for autonomous or nearly autonomous systems. What are the ethical, moral, legal responsibilities?

Borodin:

I think if you really wanted to get into the field and have an impact, you would probably start a blog and all of a sudden you would write things and people would write back and argue with you. And before you know it, if you have got enough of an audience, you are an expert.

Borodin:

Two fields in the theoretical side of Computer Science where quite a bit of interest in social computing has come from are the mathematics and algorithmics of social networks, and of course game theory and mechanism design, economics. So Craig Boutilier and I co-teach a course now called Social and Economic Networks based on the text and course by Easley and Kleinberg. It’s not a social issues course, per se, but we do talk about the phenomena of large-scale social networks: how are friendships formed, the power of weak links and so on. A lot of the issues that originate both in the sociology world and the game theory world have now been given an algorithmic flavour. This is happening because in the social networks world, the sociologists, for the first time, have large-scale data; they had always had very interesting questions but never before had the big data to look at these questions.

The course is much more tied into popular culture, if you will, because the game theory side asks how people make decisions, how you converge over repeated games and things like that, and what is the whole meaning of equilibrium. Auctions and things like that are clearly in everybody’s minds because everybody does electronic commerce and people are bidding all the time, whether they know it or not, for various things. The social networks side focuses on issues about connectivity and how are we so connected and why, how links get formed and how influences spread in the social network. Is it like a biological epidemic model or are there other models for that? So we are talking about things that kind of border on what might be called “social issues in computing”, but it is a little bit different of a course. So you will see things come up, depending on people’s research interests, depending on things that are interesting.

Obviously the widespread use of social networks caused the field to impact computer science and how are we going to study these phenomena? The game theory stuff has been around a long time but then, all of a sudden, people realized a lot of traditional game theory requires or assumes that you know how to compute certain things optimally, which you cannot do, so you wind up having a whole new field based upon computational constraints. So things will develop. Whether or not they will still be called “Social issues in computing”, or something else, remains to be seen.

C.C. (Kelly) Gotlieb is the founder of the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of Toronto (UofT), and has been called the “Father of Computing in Canada”. Gotlieb has been a consultant to the United Nations on Computer Technology and Development, and to the Privacy and Computers Task Force of the Canadian Federal Department of Communications and Justice. During the Second World War, he helped design highly-classified proximity fuse shells for the British Navy. He was a founding member of the Canadian Information Processing Society, and served as Canada’s representative at the founding meeting of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Encyclopaedia Britannica and of the Annals of the History of Computing. Gotlieb has served for the last twenty years as the co-chair of the awards committee for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and in 2012 received the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and awardee of the Isaac L. Auerbach Medal of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies. Gotlieb is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Association of Computing Machinery, the British Computer Society, and the Canadian Information Processing Society, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, the Technical University of Nova Scotia and the University of Victoria.Allan Borodin is a University Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto, and a past Chair of the Department. Borodin served as Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee for the Mathematics of Computation for many years, and is a former managing editor of the SIAM Journal of Computing. He has made significant research contributions in many areas, including algebraic computation, resource tradeoffs, routing in interconnection networks, parallel algorithms, online algorithms, information retrieval, social and economic networks, and adversarial queuing theory. Borodin’s awards include the CRM-Fields PIMS Prize; he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.